bad ideas as a creative exercise

I went to the Bakery during my lunch break to order a cake for my grandmother's birthday tomorrow (I would have made one from scratch, but I completely forgot about her birthday until yesterday, and I just don't have time). When the girl behind the counter asked me if I wanted anything written on the cake, I really really REALLY wanted to say, "Yes, could you please write 'CONGRATULATIONS! YOUR TEST RESULTS ARE NEGATIVE!' or 'SORRY THE CONDOM BROKE' or 'DON'T WORRY, IT'S JUST A COLD SORE'."

I often spend my idle time thinking up the worst possible things I could say or do in various situations. I find that I do this much, much more when I'm nervous. I think maybe sometimes I'm just starved for a creative outlet. When my sister asked me what sort of ice cream I was going to make with my new ice cream maker, I told her my first plan was tuna raisin surprise. She actually believed me.

So what other wildly inappropriate things could I have asked the girl at the bakery to write on the cake? And are there any worse flavours of ice cream than tuna raisin surprise?

(Afterword: I made a batch of pumpkin ice cream last night. I'm out of cinnamon, so I used allspice instead, and some maple syrup. Amazingly good.)

Emotional landscapes

I'm back from my weekend trip to Ottawa. Had a pretty good time - walked around Parliament Hill, through the Byward Market, went to the nature museum, finally saw Passchendaele. Ate way too many jelly beans. And I discovered that Canadians take Good Friday way, way, way seriously; NOTHING was open on Friday. I mean, Wal-Mart was closed. Wal-Mart! Yes, that Wal-Mart!

On the drive north, T and I talked about emotional landscapes; how the mental maps that we make of a place do not necessarily correspond to the dry, two dimensional images that we find on Google Earth; memories and perceptions colour the map and warp distances and sizes. This evolved into a discussion of the slippery slope of assigning our own perceptions to places as if they reflected inherent values. We were driving through an area of northern New York with very little in the way of industry or economic opportunity of any sort. The first few times I drove through it (many years ago), I thought about how depressed the area was and how depressing it must be to live there. Eventually, though, I began asking myself how I knew that. I was jumping to an unwarranted conclusion; I simply don't know the experience of the people who live there. I've never met them. I've never asked.

One of my yoga teachers talks about the Sanskrit concept of shri; life-affirming. A daisy sprouting through a crack in the pavement. Butterflies on a battlefield. We tend to find happiness, beauty, joy in the least likely places.

"...the cradle of escape"

Quoted from a poem I wrote years ago while sitting at the Bakery on a ridiculously warm December day; the full line is "Her solitary Mecca is the cradle of escape," if I remember correctly.

So... I feel totally burned out by work, and in a feat of remarkably good timing, I'm going to Oregon tomorrow to spend a few days on the coast with my siblings and some of our friends. I may or may not post while I'm there. I don't know if we'll have access to the interwebs.

I wanted to post something about statistics and science and democracy and how I generally trust their results because they are fundamentally messy processes and the messiness tends to cancel itself out when averaged over large scale experiments, but I just don't have time to put it into words right now. Oh wait... I just did.

Russian Science

Every time I think I've run out of things to write about, some idiotic new idea pops into my head.

I was reading an article in the New York Times this morning about the possibility of creating a wooly mammoth. Technically, it's not cloning because the proposed technique wouldn't use extracted mammoth DNA; rather, it would compare the extracted mammoth DNA to the DNA in the egg of an African elephant, and change the elephant DNA to match the mammoth's. Anyway, the article mentioned that there have been Russian attempts over the years to get well preserved mammoth eggs to gestate, but they've failed because the eggs weren't viable.

This got me thinking. How did the Russian scientists not realize that eggs that had been frozen for ten thousand years were no longer viable? I don't think it would even occur to an American geneticist to try such a long shot experiment. Can you imagine standing in front of a funding board and asking for money to thaw out some mammoth gonads and see if they'll still produce furry baby elephants? You'd never ever get funding for that in this country. People would think you were insane. I think these Russian attempts must have taken place during the Soviet era, when there was enough bureaucracy that wild little projects could be buried in other proposals and rubber stamped.

This also brought to mind stories I've heard of the Russian space program in the 60's; big dreams, crazy schemes, somewhat (i.e., rather) lax safety protocols. I have to admit, I sort of admire that "well, it does sound crazy, but let's just try it and see what happens" mindset. Is this characteristic of Russian culture? I wonder.

Also, the idea of mammoths being brought back, of herds of pachyderms wandering the Russian steppe and the North American prairies, is just awesome.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, RIP

I know this is a bit belated. Solzhenitsyn, great 20th century Russian author and misanthrope, died about a week ago. The very next morning, there was an eight page obituary in the New York Times (well, it was eight pages on their website; I don't know how long it ran in the paper). This brought up something I've wondered about in the past... the Times must have had most of this obituary already written, right? So if you are famous and live long enough, major newspapers will assign staff writers to write your obituary, even if you're not pushing up daisies yet. What an odd thing to contemplate. I wonder if they also write obituaries for out of control starlets who seem like they could die at any moment. Britney? Lindsay?

I hate the fact that I just mentioned those two in a post about Solzhenitsyn. Totally inappropriate.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, rest in peace. I ran into a Trotskyist on the private bus from Xela to Guate a few weeks ago. You probably would have hated him, but I was just grateful for our conversation (which punctuated the endless stream of Jean Claude van Damme movies that were, incongruously, playing on the bus).

Science koan

Okay, enough maudlin claptrap already. Sheesh.

My best friend in high school and I used to challenge each other with (often semi-idiotic) thought questions - if dinosaurs were resurrected would they be kosher, and that sort of thing. There's one I've been mulling over for a few years now, and I think the time has come for it to see the light of day:

Take earth (please!), as it is now. Remove all people from it. Remove all representations of people from it - no statues, no video, no images. I don't care why everyone is gone, we just are. Maybe there was a disaster, or maybe we heard there were good investment opportunities in the Andromeda Galaxy. Anyway, we're all gone, leaving infrastructure, cars, office buildings, etc. intact. Now imagine that someone from an alien civilization lands on earth. Would he/she/it be able to determine what we looked like just from the things we made and used? Would they be able to tell we had a torso, a head up top, and four appendages? Five fingers on each of two hands? My guess is that in very gross terms (approximate height, size, shape), it would be possible to reconstruct us physically. How many (if any) of the physical details of our existence would be irreproducible, though?

I really don't know how I struck upon this question. I think it came to me as I was driving a few years ago.

Also: happy belated 50th birthday to the Lego brick. I think I still have my Junior Builder's Club card from ~1979 somewhere. I should laminate it and put it in my wallet.